As has been mentioned before, the original movers in the
conspiracy were of low extraction, Dublin tradesmen in a small way of
business. Napper Tandy was an ironmonger, Wolfe Tone was the son of a
coach-maker. But they had obtained a recruit of a very different class,
a younger son of the Duke of Leinster, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, a man of
very slender capacity, who, at his first entrance into Parliament, when
scarcely more than of age, had made himself remarkable by a furious
denunciation of Pitt's Irish propositions; had married a natural
daughter of the Duke of Orleans, a prince, in spite of his royal birth,
one of the most profligate and ferocious of the French Jacobins; and had
caught the revolutionary mania to such a degree that he abjured his
nobility, and substituted for the appellation which marked his rank the
title of "Citizen Fitzgerald." He had enrolled himself in a society
known as the United Irishmen, and had gone to France, as its
plenipotentiary, to arrange with Hoche, one of the most brilliant and
popular of the French generals, a scheme for the invasion of Ireland, in
which he promised him that, on his landing, he should be joined by tens
of thousands of armed Irishmen. Hoche entered warmly into the plan, was
furnished with a splendid army by the Directors, and in December, 1796,
set sail for Ireland; but the fleet which carried him was dispersed in a
storm; many of the ships were wrecked, others were captured by the
British cruisers, and the remnant of the fleet, sadly crippled, was glad
to regain its harbors.
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